Martin Kaymer earned his first victory in around 4 years as many European stars shined in the Italian Open.
Kaymer carded a second round of 63 at Gardagolf to finish 11 under par, but the entire field will be separated by just seven shots heading into the weekend.
“It’s been a while since I played that solid,” Kaymer said (h/t ESPN).
“I think I was getting very close recently but that positivity was missing on the golf course because I haven’t had a lot of good results.
“It doesn’t matter if you’ve won majors and had the situations I had at the Ryder Cup, it’s really exciting to be in a position that you can win a golf tournament again.”
Graeme McDowell experienced his last win back in 2015. McDowell was named as a Ryder Cup vice-captain last week but still of qualifying for the team instead, as he missed that opportunity back in 2016.
“My head will be down this weekend and I will be grinding really hard,” McDowell said.
“There’s a lot of really great players in this field.
“I’ll have to play well to win. It would do a lot for me, would do a lot for my summer, a lot for my Ryder Cup bid and a lot for my confidence in general.”
Danny Willett added a 67 to his opening 65 and has yet to drop a shot this week.
“I haven’t made a cut for a while so to actually be this side of the leaderboard is pretty nice,” Willett said.
“I’ve been working really hard and I’ve not been getting any results and you just have to keep your head down and hope that you get a couple of days like this under your belt.”
The game certainly evolves, and now golfers are getting into the web3 industry, especially with the rise of content creator crypto, for example.
A lot of golfers are even getting into gaming crypto and streamer crypto, as they are both big markets with a lot of cross-over, as many of the holders within those markets are fans of golf, or play golf personally.